TORONTO — There are moments in Terry Fallis’s exhilarating new novel, Albatross, when it reads like an ode to — of all things — the fountain pen. His youthful first-person narrator keeps rhapsodizing about the respective glories of the Pilot Custom Heritage 92, the Platinum Preppi, gold nibs and Diamine Ancient Copper ink.

Indeed, Adam Coryell’s love for a venerable form of writing, in continuing peril these days from the dominance of the ball point pen, is far more entrenched than the other world that consumes him — the world of golf. And there’s the rub.

Since the arrival of his first novel, The Best Laid Plans, in 2008, Fallis has shown a penchant for mischievous irony. It’s present in spades with this new one thanks to the presence of a young hero who meets all the attributes of a championship golfer and ends up an international celebrity as a result. There’s only one catch — Adam doesn’t really like golf.

There’s a note of merriment in Fallis’s voice as he ponders the fictional predicament he has imposed on Adam, a character he clearly enjoyed creating.

“There are a lot of books written about heroes and faultless people, but not as many are written about more humanly flawed characters,” he says during an interview in the Toronto office where he continues to perform his day job as a communications consultant. “Most of my characters are flawed — usually some combination of hopeless, hapless and helpless in certain areas. But you will know them too as genuinely good people with good hearts.”

That was true of The Best Laid Plans, a backroom political satire fuelled by Fallis’s own early experiences in Ottawa writing speeches and policy papers for federal ministers. And it’s true of Albatross, an endearing coming-of-age novel about “the importance of integrating with that which makes you really happy in life.”

There’s a good deal of Fallis himself in his seventh novel.

“I am a fountain-pen nerd, so there was no research writing all of the fountain-pen sections,” he says.

He’s also been an avid golfer since he took his first lesson at the age of 12, and he writes about this sport with an easy communicability that should even sustain the interest of those readers who have never been on a golf course. “I’m not particularly good,” he says, “but I still love the game and know a lot about it.”

He also draws on childhood memories of summer camp.

“The scene where the bear invades the campsite — that was me!” Fallis says. “Despite how out of fashion it might be, I remain deeply rooted in the write-about-what-you-know school. I always want to write with some degree of authenticity and authority and conviction, and to me that often means plumbing the depths of my own experiences.”

So Fallis was on firm ground when writing about the dilemma of young Adam, a kid who doesn’t really like golf or the celebrity culture that swamps him when he becomes an international tabloid figure. He’s only swinging a club because of a visionary teacher named Miss Davenport. She’s an endearing eccentric who was once on the verge of a major golfing career herself, a career sadly curtailed by medical circumstance, and who sees Adam as a possible form of wish fulfilment.

Adam has also fallen into the orbit of a dogmatic academic possessed by the theory that every human being, regardless of personal inclination, has a body supremely suited to excel in one specified sport. For Adam, it’s golf. So if he’s not enjoying himself — tough bananas: golf is his god-given destiny.

Yet, Fallis adds coyly, Albatross isn’t really about golf.

“To me, the important part is about exploring the understanding and exploring the difference between success and happiness — and the confusion we sometimes have dealing with both of these as important parts of our lives. Even if Adam is really good at something that brings him fame and fortune, it may not be what he’s been put on earth to do and what gives him fulfilment. In other words we can lose track of what makes us really happy . . . .”

Fallis looks at his own history — no desire to write at the beginning, but a father who instilled him a “love of language, a reverence for language.” That reverence went even deeper when he started reading novels after years of concentrating on non-fiction. “A whole world opened up for me in my late 20s,” he says now. And that led to his debut novel, which won him a Leacock Medal for Humour.

“To me, the important part is about exploring the understanding and exploring the difference between success and happiness — and the confusion we sometimes have dealing with both of these as important parts of our lives.”

And again, there’s irony in Fallis’s own break-through story. When he completed The Best Laid Plans, he couldn’t find a publisher. Even the quest for an agent proved futile. The only one who even took the time to respond to his query was incredulous: “You’ve written a satirical novel about Canadian politics! Whatever were you were thinking?”

Well, what Terry Fallis was thinking was that he had written a pretty funny book.

Undeterred, he went ahead and published it himself, figuring he had an impressive precedent in Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock. “Even Leacock self-published early in his career. He would publish things and then sell them at railway stations.”

The Best Laid Plans went on to win the coveted Leacock, at which point he immediately found a publisher in McClelland & Stewart. The previously reluctant agent took him into her stable, and the CBC mounted a popular mini-series based on the book.

But does a Leacock medal — he won again in 2015 — make Fallis a humorist? There’s no doubt his books can be hilarious: There’s one scene in Albatross in which Adam is threatened by bad guys who are dispatched by him in a manner worthy of a James Bond thriller at its most outrageous. But moments later, genuine sadness takes over.

“I’m sometimes introduced as a humorist,” Fallis says thoughtfully. “I’m fine with it, but I don’t think of myself that way. There’s always a thread of melancholy in my writings.”

But Irving is also the eternal optimist.

“I can’t imagine writing a novel that didn’t leave off on a sort of optimistic note. It would be out of character for me. I don’t think I write as well when I step out of myself.”